Crystal Ball Breaking

So here we are again, at the beginning of a new year, a moment when predictions for 2014 – reach epidemic proportions. There's nothing easier
or less demanding than prognosticating about what the next 12 months will bring.

And there’s nothing that means as little. That's
because our short attention span and Internet memory cycles mean there's no accountability whatsoever for predictions that weren't close to coming true. We can't remember what we had for lunch
yesterday, let alone what a tech blog said a few months ago. But rather than hold ourselves out there for delayed humiliation, we thought we'd put the
difficulties of crystal-ball reading in perspective by highlighting some of the most insanely wrong predictions from last year. So here goes:

Maybe insights into 2013 were running dry last year, because Shel
Israel in Forbes simply told us that “buzzwords will die.” And he was specific – not just any words of buzz, but “mobile” and “cloud-based” and
“social networks.” Though we might wish that his prediction was correct, it was hard to find a blog, article, or news story this year that didn’t feature one of these
words.

Wireless Charging – An Idea Whose Time Has Come (but only if you’re in the prediction business.)

Freeing ourselves from the slavery of the outlet is something that all of us who’ve cut conversations short at the dismal end of our power supply
would delight in.

Given the substantial growth of mobile payments in 2013, you’d have to call CNET’s prediction a
whiff.

Paywalls Will Be as Hated as was the Berlin Wall

One of Millward Brown’s 2013 predictions argued that there will be an increase in the erection of paywalls – credit to
them, they were right there. But their assertion that with “consumers now having to pay, you can expect audience sizes for premium content sites to fall as consumers look for alternative free
content or go without,” has been somewhat off-target.

So there you have it – the walk of shame for
predictions that made sense at the time. To be fair, we did cherry pick some obviously errant examples to make our case. But most predictions were either dead wrong, or restatements of undeniable
trends.

Occasionally, someone hits the nail on the head, but the end-of-year prediction game is the
apogee of inaccuracy. That’s because it exists for a flawed reason, as a mutually beneficial ecosystem for the predictor and the media. And, because the instinct to find out “what’s
next” is hard wired into all of us.